


Infernal Machines and Demonic Pigeons

by 27dragons, tisfan



Series: Good Omens Bingo [3]
Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Accidents, Gardener Aziraphale (Good Omens), Gardening, Lower Tadfield (Good Omens), M/M, Mild Gore, The Them - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-21
Updated: 2019-08-21
Packaged: 2020-09-23 10:07:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20338366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/27dragons/pseuds/27dragons, https://archiveofourown.org/users/tisfan/pseuds/tisfan
Summary: Crowley is disappointed with the lawn mower...For Ineffable Husbands Bingo: Lawn Mower Accident(tisfan and dragons had the same square)





	Infernal Machines and Demonic Pigeons

God, it was said, did not play dice with the Universe. She did, rather more frequently than strictly necessary, give people exactly what they wanted in such a way that they didn’t want it any longer.

Crowley was just staring up at the ceiling of the little cottage in Tadfield that he and Aziraphale had moved into following the Apoca-could-ya-not. Just to keep a closer eye on Adam. And maybe to avoid some of their fellow angels and demons who stood out like sore thumbs in even larger cities and therefore would be quite easily spotted in a little village like Tadfield. He was staring at the ceiling, trying to decide if the crack in the plaster looked more like a duck or a cow, thinking he was blessedly bored and what he wouldn’t do for a little bit of action, when Aziraphale _shrieked _from out in the garden.

It was the sort of shriek that meant something was very, dreadfully wrong.

“Crowley! Crowley, I need you right now!” His voice was rather higher-pitched than usual, full of panic and distress.

“I see you up there, having a laugh at me,” Crowley said to God as he rolled off the sofa in an awkward lump of too many bones and not enough muscle before bolting out of the house.

The scene was--

Bloody awful, and he meant that in every literal meaning of the words _bloody_ and _awful_.

The grass, fresh cut and quivering with the need to please, was coated with blood. And feathers.

_White feathers._

“Angel!” Crowley practically exploded into panic, arriving at Aziraphale’s side in seconds, looking him over for some sort of celestial wound. Angels and demons weren’t entirely able to be killed, but they could be destroyed. And Aziraphale could certainly be discorporated. Who knew what would happen to him, if he ended up going back upstairs _now_.

“Oh, Crowley, it’s just dreadful!” Aziraphale wailed. “_Do something!_” His hands were flailing, waving helplessly in the direction of the lawn mower, which had spatters of blood all around its edges, and a few mangled feathers trapped under the front wheels.

“You!” Crowley turned on the mower fiercely. Unlike Aziraphale, he had not been issued a flaming sword, but he could make do with a pair of summoned garden hedge trimmers. He didn’t exactly borrow any hellfire to make the blades drip with infernal glee, but there were a few volcanoes in the south Pacific that wouldn’t miss a bit of lava. “You had one job! One! _Cut the grass_! And you manage to bollox it all up? I am very disappointed in you.”

One might think that something like a yard tool, like the Flymo Easi Glide 330 wouldn’t be able to be terrified of a demon. It’s as if one might expect a computer to be nervous, or a camera to _want _to take a better picture. But anyone who’s ever cursed or yelled at or pleaded with one of their electrical devices can tell you; machines _think_. And they’re rather diabolical, at that.

What this particular machine was thinking was that the grass was much greener. Somewhere else. Anywhere else.

The mower started itself with a rumble and fled, spewing feathers and blood and grass clippings as it went.

“Where does it hurt, Angel?” Crowley, having dealt with the bad machine, turned a tender hand on his Angel, looking for the wounds.

“What? No, no, I’m fine, but look at this poor thing!” He bent and scooped up a pile of feathers from the lawn, holding it tenderly in his hands, and extended it for Crowley’s examination.

Upon closer look, it wasn’t a pile of feathers at all, but a bird, rather severely mangled, cut nearly in half by the mower’s blades.

“It’s a _pigeon_,” Crowley said, both of his eyebrows going up so high that he could rather feel them arguing with his hair. “Rather a lot of them around these parts, aye? Seen ‘em at the park, the kiddies feed them. Blasted waste of bread if you ask me.”

“I don’t know what it was doing in the grass,” Aziraphale said. Crowley got the impression that if his hands weren’t full of dead bird, he’d be wringing them. “I was just going along and suddenly...” He tipped his head and gave Crowley a faint little smile. “Can’t you fix it? I never meant it any harm.”

“That’s more your thing than mine,” Crowley said, vaguely annoyed now that there was no need to panic about that fact that Aziraphale’s wing hadn’t been torn off by the lawn mower. Speaking of which, the Easi Glide was all the way down in Hogsback wood by now, and they’d like to never see it again. Pity that. On the other hand, Crowley had obtained rather a lot of enjoyment from the act of purchasing it, and now he’d get to do that again. “I’m not supposed to go around bringing things back to life. Could get in a load of trouble that way.” 

To be fair, Crowley didn’t really know what he was supposed to be doing any longer. He wasn’t, technically speaking, employed by Hell any longer. But on one had yet stopped by with a manual. Or a new job offer. He and Aziraphale were keeping an eye on the boy, a familiar occupation, for lack of something else, and concentrating very hard on being Left Alone by the Forces of both Light and Darkness.

Aziraphale _pouted_ at him, petulant and maybe just a touch disappointed.

“Miracle it up, Angel,” Crowley scolded. “For Sata-- for Heav-- for _someone’s _sake, stop being a wimp about a little blood.”

“I’m not being a wimp about the blood,” Aziraphale said primly. “It was just so _awful_, darling. I’m never going to be able to get the image out of my mind. And if I can’t _picture_ her whole, then you know I can’t make it work.” He turned up the intensity of the pout. “Won’t you? For me?”

“Very well,” Crowley said, because he never could resist that pout. Or, not even so much the pout, but the beaming smile that happened afterward, the one that said Crowley had done something right. When God spoke, and said _Let there be Light, _Crowley liked to imagine that that was the moment that Aziraphale came into existence. The embodiment of that very first sunrise. “But you know, she’s going to take after me,” he said. He cupped the dead thing in his hands, little broken bones and mangled feathers. He imagined this pigeon shitting on the mayor’s car, right after he washed it. Of stealing the candle off some poor child’s birthday cake and leaving bird tracks in the frosting. This particular pigeon would be the very worst sort of bird, annoyingly loud, waking up people who worked the night shift by singing joyfully outside their window at sunrise.

And she would have babies. Dozens of eggs in a nest, hundreds of terrible, wretched pigeons. Smart, too. The sort that would figure up a way to take down anti-pigeon devices and leave them in the yards of the people who voted such measures into place.

A demon bird.

Or, to be more succinct: A pigeon. 

It wiggled all over, flapped its wings and Crowley turned it loose. It shit on his jacket as he did so. “Ug! That’s gratitude for you!”

“Oh!” Aziraphale clapped his hands and smiled like the first dawn, and everything seemed just a little brighter and better, even the pigeon shit on his jacket. “Thank you, my dear.” He kissed Crowley’s cheek, blushing a little over it being such a public display. “Well. I think we’d best take a trip into town this afternoon, hadn’t we? I’ll need a new mower -- you didn’t need to frighten the poor thing so badly! -- and of course we’ll need a little roost for our new friend.”

“The mower upset you,” Crowley told him, trying to remember not to brush at the bird poo, since that would only smear it around more. The things you learned, living in Hell. Poo was sticky and smeary and the more you tried to clean it up, the worse it got. Crowley took the jacket off instead, folding it inside out and slung it over his shoulder. He could get a new jacket. “It obviously doesn’t belong here.”

Aziraphale gave him a look that was trying to be stern, but was far too fond and pleased to come anywhere near the mark. “Be that as it may,” he said, “try not to traumatize the next one so much, or folks will wonder why we need a new one every other week.”

“I’ll just tell them their mowers are rubbish,” Crowley said, taking Aziraphale’s arm and leading him back into the house where they could have tea and whatever little nibbly things Aziraphale had gotten to go with the tea. “And I’ll do it in that same sort of loud, complainish voice as if I were an upstanding member of the Tadfield Neighborhood Watch and they’ll jump to it.”

“Yes, dear, as much as you like,” Aziraphale said, patting Crowley’s hand before breaking off into the kitchen to put the kettle on and arrange a tray. “You’ll want to change before we go into town, I expect.”

Crowley didn’t much care for tea, or crackers, or little dainty chocolates. He liked fizzy drinks and terrible biscuits from corner petrol stations. He never needed to buy petrol, but he did like to stop at the stations. But Crowley did enjoy watching Aziraphale have his tea and his chocolate biscuits.

The doorbell rang, and Crowley sauntered off to answer it. It was tea-time and he was going to give the neighbor who rang the bell what for, because no one interrupted Aziraphale’s tea-time, and _someone _was going to have to learn the rules around here.

“Hi, Mr. Crowley!” The Them were clustered on the stoop, beaming up at him. Behind them, tied to what Crowley suspected was Dog’s lead, was the Easi Glide, motor sputtering somewhat resentfully.

“Your mower escaped into the woods,” Adam told him.

“_My_ mower never does anything exciting like that,” Wensley added.

Pepper rolled her eyes, and Brian leaned to one side to peer past Crowley into the cottage. “I say, is that tea?”

“Indeed it is,” Crowley said. He glared at the mower, which promptly sprouted a petrol leak, soaking the sidewalk. “Mr. Fell might be willing to share some biscuits with you, if you all ask nicely.” He liked children, and the Them were top on his list of favorites. Of course, it wasn’t always a good thing to be the favored child of a demon.

On the other hand, they were also favorites of Aziraphale’s, and having a guardian angel sort of equaled things out.

“Tie the mower up outside, Adam,” Crowley said. “I’ll take care of it later.” That was a little more threatening. “Well, go on then, in you get, have some tea.” He stood in the doorway a moment longer, watching the mower shiver and shake. “Infernal machine. You get one more chance, and consider it a miracle. I’ve gone soft.”

That was all right, then. Aziraphale liked _soft_.


End file.
